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Scope of our sustainable agriculture and farmer livelihoods data

All data relates to the BAT Group and covers the 2017 calendar year. Details of the source and scope for each of our key metrics are provided below.

Definition

Scope

Wood fuel sources

Percentage of wood used by our contracted farmers for curing fuels from sustainable or unsustainable sources.

Sustainable wood sources are defined as: wood resources harvested legally from planted sources in such a way that does not cause any detrimental social, environmental or economic impact. This may include:

Wood sourced from identified invasive exotic species which have not been planted; and

Wood sourced from existing legal plantations.

This definition does not include conversion of natural forests to plantations in order to produce wood for tobacco curing.

Data collected from a sample of 43,000 that are contracted by BAT Leaf operations. Out of the total 90,000 farmers contracted, around 46,500 use wood for curing.

In some cases, where our operations have contracts a large number of farmers, farmer samples have been used.

This does not include wood fuel used by farmers contracted by Reynolds American Inc (RAI), our US subsidiary that we acquired in July 2017, or data from farmers which source our third-party suppliers.

Independent supplier reviews

Number of independent on-site reviews conducted by AB Sustain, a supply chain management company, as part of the industry-wide Sustainable Tobacco Programme. These include visits to tobacco farms and in-depth analyses of suppliers’ policies, processes and practices.

100% of first-tier tobacco leaf suppliers to the BAT Group.

First-tier suppliers are those companies from which we purchase tobacco leaf that, in turn, source from a large farmer base. These include 17 BAT leaf operations companies, which directly contract over 90,000 farmers, and 20+ third-party suppliers, which source from over 260,000 farmers. RAI is included in the data as a third-party supplier for 2017 and will be integrated as a BAT leaf operation in 2018.